So mom got a new computer for her birthday. If you have been reading, i can now tell you that was deal #2. Dad bought her a brand new Dell computer with 3 gigs of ram and a 3ghz dual processor. It also has 500 gigs of hard drive space, and just to make sure she did not run out of room he also bought her a 500 gig external storage drive. oh, and by the way that new 22” lcd monitor is total sweet. Ryan and i spent a good couple of hours setting up and trying to transfer files from moms old computer to her new one. after being told (by the old computer) that it would take 237 mins. (which is roughly 4 hours) to transfer a 3.5 gig file we decided to let it go and call it a night. the next day i came back and picked up both boxes and took them home where i could work on them while doing other things. once i started to investigate why the old computer was running so slow i discovered that it had about 35 (and this is not an exaggeration) background programs running. after closing all of them but the ones need to run the computer things picked up speed. i spent several more hours sifting though moms computer to find things i thought she might need and downloaded drivers for the stuff she would be hooking up to the computer. on sunday morning, hopping that she had not come home yet i took the boxes back to their house and spent 2 more hours hooking up all the cords fighting stuff on moms desk and making sure it had an internet connection and was working ok. Later that day dad called me and kept me on the phone while he brought mom in to show her the new present. she was happy, i think. any way, we still have a lot to do. we still have to reload all the programs that she used on a regular basis and make sure we got all the things she want to have on her new computer. I hope to show her how to close down her background programs so that this Really fast computer does not start running slow too. but that having been said Happy birthday mom.